doing patchwork liberalism in a handful of countries for 75 years drove up human life expectancy by two and a half fold and income by twenty fold but then we let people read their neighbors thoughts online and now that’s over
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When liberalism answered to the people. The working class. The poor.That all ended with Reagan and Thatcher.
liberalism ran back to daddy and the crown. Capital and the markets.
Social media is the privatized psychological operations of finance and the bouguise state. Same privilege all new suckers.
All of the things listed have continued to improve during that period. Slower for the countries that were further left tbh, at least in the last 2 decades
Not to be a tankie, but life expectancy in the US increased from 58yrs to 76yrs between 1925 and 2000 (<>+ 30%) In China, it's 32yrs‑70yrs over the same period, and in Russia 30yrs‑65yrs, which is closer to your 2 and half fold in both cases, so I would say it wasn't liberalism that did this.
to be fair, a lot of that leap in life expectancy was deng and later soviet chairmen
it does warm me heart that both sides of the cold war declared that since liberalism wasn't good enough that they'd let fascism destroy their entire way of life though
I mean, most of the life expectancy growth everywhere has been driven by innovations in public health, vaccination, and pharmaceuticals but yeah, that isn’t necessarily a “liberal capitalist” thing, lots of the innovation was driven by the ussr or by US state research grants
Maybe liberalism will fail, maybe it won't, but liberalism has overcome far worse things than the Trump movement and its fellow travelers, so not only would I not assume that liberalism will fail because of the current challenge, I would even say that it is unlikely that it will fail. We'll see.
In terms of biomedical research that benefits the world, the vast majority of this research has so far been carried out in the US/Canada/Australia/New Zealand and Western and Central Europe. Now China and India are also beginning to participate in a more significant way.
True, but also counterpoint - Soviet Russia and Maoist China were engaging in developmentalism explicitly to keep up with liberalism, and to offer a competitive suite of social wages in lieu of liberal democracy.
Hmm. Personally I think the widening wealth gap and fall in living standards in the west directly following the fall of the Berlin Wall till today points to it being the other way round.
I'm afraid like I really don't follow your implication here.
I'm not an expert on the German reunification, but my intuition here is just to say a lot of wealthy industrialists made a lot of money exploiting Eastern Germans after the development boom had already ended for Germany.
I mean with the decline of Soviet power, the alternate economic model suddenly looked less viable, and the west didn’t have to keep up with the rising standards in the USSR and immediately started winding-back concessions to the working class.
I would argue that the Soviet Union was much more effective in pushing race relations and women's rights internationally than pursuing workers rights internationally, or even domestically, I'd argue - but I'll admit that's a very American perspective on the history.
the thing about competition is it drives both parties to react to eachother, also i am not convinced living standards in the us have fallen vs. where they were in the 1990s. availability of ethnic food for one is wildly improved.
Living standards in the US and the West are significantly higher than they were in the 1990s. Just look at GDP per capita for that, but indicators like life expectancy also say the same. Things have improved in the West since the 1990s, and in most of the world as well.
That's just wrong. GDP isn't a good measure of standard of living particularly in highly financialized countries like the US. Public goods are way down. But hey insurance premiums are way up so that's great.
The USSR had a dramatically lower standard of living than the US, not to mention dramatically less freedom. Yes, American elites saw themselves as competing with the USSR, but when it came to the standard of living of their populations, they knew that the US was far ahead.
US wasn’t comparable to China and Russia in 1925 though. To say they started on the back foot would be an understatement.
Comparing East and West Germany - who started on an equal footing - gives a significantly more muted response. The only real conclusion is that shock doctrine was disastrous
Communism didn't increase worldwide life expectancy by being a better economic manager, it did it by freeing people from colonial (or autocratic) exploitation. Which is something the liberal west wasn't capable of, because it was them doing the exploitation.
Yes, Russia and China started at a much lower place than the US, as eamonmcnelis own numbers demonstrate. This is because Russia and China modernized after the US. China's per capita income increased dramatically after they opened up to capitalism, by the way.
Regarding the comparison between West and East Germany, as you can see from your graph, East Germany had significantly lower life expectancy than West Germany by the 80s, and now that difference has mostly disappeared.
East Germany also had significantly lower income than West Germany. In fact, despite being the best-run socialist country, East Germany had to have a wall to prevent its citizens from emigrating en masse to West Germany. This is pretty strong evidence that socialism was a failure.
Further evidence of the failure of socialism is the fact that Eastern European countries had significantly lower life expectancy than Western European countries by the 1980s, and they still have a lower life expectancy than Western countries, despite significant gains since the end of socialism.
Social media did not create this problem. We're not looking at the result of social media, we're looking at the end of an 80 year long criminal conspiracy to undo all of the progress of the 19th and 20th centuries.
I think what we are living through is the struggle for humans to adapt to the information available. The same type of upheaval that humans saw with the advent of the printing press, widely distributed newspapers and TV in every home. Each of those led to mass improvement after upheaval.
We need to be positive about our future, which I’m finding almost impossible now! I agree with you about opinions which are like genitals - unless someone asks to see them we should keep them closely guarded!
I don’t think the internet wrecked it all. I think long before, we’d already allowed a creeping dominance of oligarchy systematically fearmonger, drive strategic wedges amongst us, force the splintered polarizing of the left, force education & standard of living to plummet.
The internet is a manipulable tool, just like television, film, radio & photography before it. You can dress up all the floating pyramids & lizard people in business suits you want, you wouldn’t fool so many if we hadn’t allowed so many to become fools.
• Yes, let’s defend liberal democracy.
• But let’s stop acting like its collapse is the people’s fault for thinking out loud.
• And maybe, just maybe, don’t treat your neighbor’s thoughts as the virus—but your own pride as the blindfold.
We certainly could have anticipated it was going to be catastrophic to society.
E.M. Forster’s short story “the machine stops” was written in 1909….to say nothing about the mountain of philosophical works on technology/science and society…
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Hyperconnectivity ruined the dream
liberalism ran back to daddy and the crown. Capital and the markets.
Social media is the privatized psychological operations of finance and the bouguise state. Same privilege all new suckers.
Internet makes it even easier, as it's fake video heaven..
it does warm me heart that both sides of the cold war declared that since liberalism wasn't good enough that they'd let fascism destroy their entire way of life though
one species
I'm not an expert on the German reunification, but my intuition here is just to say a lot of wealthy industrialists made a lot of money exploiting Eastern Germans after the development boom had already ended for Germany.
It is closer to tankie behavior to see a joke with "liberal" in it and then get furious. Only you can say if that's you.
Comparing East and West Germany - who started on an equal footing - gives a significantly more muted response. The only real conclusion is that shock doctrine was disastrous
Look at Ireland, we never had a New Deal flirtation with socialism, nor did we get a Marshall Plan bump, yet the graph plays out essentially the same
The Oligarchy approves of this and facilitates it.
Try truth, compassion, and repentance.
Not revisionist pedestal-building.
• But let’s stop acting like its collapse is the people’s fault for thinking out loud.
• And maybe, just maybe, don’t treat your neighbor’s thoughts as the virus—but your own pride as the blindfold.
E.M. Forster’s short story “the machine stops” was written in 1909….to say nothing about the mountain of philosophical works on technology/science and society…